And like I said, Ian’s an old friend.
PORTCULLIS HOUSE is a newish office building a short walk from the House of Commons. It’s modern and characterless, complete with trickling ponds, fig trees and the inevitable glass atrium. It’s apparently considered relatively lavish by public sector standards – MPs aren’t known for holding back where their own perks are concerned – but by investment banking standards it doesn’t make the grade. MPs are little people who really don’t understand excess. They caused a scandal when it emerged that some of the offices had chairs with automatic massage devices built into them. What planet are these people on? When I want a massage, I send for a couple of Ukrainians. Anyway, I wouldn’t house our back office in a tacky dump like this.
I’m here to be grilled in public by a cross-party group of MPs who are supposedly investigating the crisis in the financial markets. There are fourteen members of the committee, only three of them women – and none even vaguely jumpable – and they don’t know jack shit about finance. If this crisis is as real as it seems it might be, these guys are definitely not the Seventh Cavalry. Looking at their CVs in the briefing notes provided by the Silver Fox, I wouldn’t hire a single one of them. They wouldn’t even make it past the front door at Grossbank, or at any serious firm for that matter, but in a sense that doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it’s an opportunity.
Because the select committee is really a form of spectator sport, a reality TV show where second-tier politicians try to score points, look good and maybe, if they’re lucky, revive sagging careers.
As if anyone cared.
Well, today will be different. Because I’m here and I care. I’m going to make it so apparent that I care that even the most genuinely caring television viewer will stop and think what a wonderful human being I am. It’s all been carefully scripted in well-rehearsed sound-bites from the Silver Fox and the team at Ball Taittinger, so that nothing can possibly go wrong.
But there is another agenda. There always is. How simple – and dull – would life be if we didn’t have at least one other agenda all of the time? I generally have several, sometimes contradictory, and often I don’t even know what they are myself. They just unfold as I ricochet through life. It adds to the fun. What the team from Ball Taittinger don’t know today is that while I’m here I’m also going to call time on the whole of the investment banking industry as we know it. That’s the unscripted part.
I’m shown into a conference room where the committee are sitting. There are a bunch of journalists and TV crews, and a small table at the front where I get to sit facing the members of the committee. It’s probably designed to look like the conference rooms used in Washington for the Senate hearings, intended to be intimidating for little people who are easily frightened. I’ve chosen to be unaccompanied on the grounds that it makes me look braver, quietly confident that I’m master of my brief, probably more open and honest. It also means there’ll be no one to gag me or interrupt when I go off message.
The chairman of the select committee is a Labour MP called Ivor Morgan: mid fifties, never held senior office, thinning hair but does nothing to hide it, overweight and couldn’t give a damn, dresses badly even by MPs’ standards and has a reputation as a maverick who fears nothing and no one. I like mavericks, so long as I can point them in the right direction.
He starts me off easily enough, polite intros to the committee, explaining the scope of the enquiry, the concerns of all the political parties about the events unfolding in the markets and how my initial press conference on Special Purpose Investment Vehicles seems to have been the crack in the dam that led to the deluge.
I’m in fresh-faced smiling mode, modest, quietly unassuming: everyone’s idea of a thoroughly decent bloke.
‘It wasn’t just me. All of us at Grossbank wanted to take a stand on this issue. It’s a question of trust. And honour. If people can’t trust the banks, where does that leave society? Where does it leave the economy? The banks are fundamental to our economic well-being, and they have to be morally and ethically unimpeachable. Of course it was an expensive decision to take, and it’s hardly made us popular in the banking industry, but it’s about doing what’s right. I have a little girl, Samantha, and I have to be able to look her in the eye and tell her I always did what I thought was right …’ Blah, blah, blah.
Amazingly, they seem to swallow this line. Grossbank wasn’t the villain. We had no hidden motives. We came clean. We were the good guys. It’s all the others that have come skulking in from the darkness who are the villains – the ones who wanted to hide their liabilities offshore, who recklessly sleepwalked into risk positions that they didn’t understand, who are coming to the taxpayer for bail-outs now the music’s finally stopped.
Sitting at the back of the conference room, the Silver Fox is quietly nodding his approval. His team look relaxed. This is going marvellously. Who’d have thought it?
‘Chairman, with your permission?’ One of the Lib Dems on the committee wants to ask a question.
Ivor Morgan nods. ‘By all means – go ahead.’
I sit up and smile disarmingly at a skinny intellectual with a pointy beard and a mass of curly dark hair, who comes from somewhere up North and is sufficiently unbalanced that he’s devoting his one unrepeatable life to working for a political party that will never, ever be elected to power.
‘Mr Hart, could you explain what actually motivates people in banking?’
Bingo. It had to come. I had my own ideas on how to introduce it into the conversation if they never got round to it, but I guessed that mediocre, low-life losers like this would never be able to pass up an opportunity to question a master of the universe about how much he gets paid.
‘Greed.’
Silence. He frowns and looks at his colleagues. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Greed.’
Another long pause. ‘I’m sorry?’
I take a deep breath, trying not too hard to hide my impatience. ‘Let me put it this way. Think of all the MPs in the House of Commons. All of them. Are you with me so far?’
The whole atmosphere has changed. They can sense my hostility and they don’t know quite where this is going.
Ivor Morgan takes charge again. He answers cautiously on behalf of his colleague, his eyes narrowed. ‘I think we’re with you so far, Mr Hart.’
‘Well, last year I earned more than them.’ I look around at the committee members one by one. ‘All of them. Combined.’
There’s one of those electrifying silences around the whole room that tells you this is a Great Television Moment. This will be flashed around the world, shown on prime-time news programmes in countries whose names I can’t even spell; it will be a million-hit wonder on YouTube in less than twenty-four hours and will make bankers’ pay the number one topic of conversation at dinner tables everywhere. It’s not as good as sex, but it comes pretty damned close.
I lean forward and fix Ivor Morgan with a piercing stare. No joking now, no more Mr Nice Guy. We’re talking money. ‘Last year I made over a hundred million. It was a pretty exceptional year, it’s true, and I was lucky in that I had a lot of stock vesting and options to exercise. But I passed the magic hundred. That’s pounds, not dollars or euros or tenge from Kazakhstan.’ I turn and smile patronisingly at my Lib Dem friend. ‘I’m talking real money.’
He’s angry now; angry and on the attack. ‘How can you possibly justify such a huge sum?’
I shrug carelessly. ‘I don’t have to. I’m an investment banker. This is what we do. We’re not charity workers. Or politicians.’
I’ve rocked them. I’ve rocked the whole room. I glance over my shoulder and the Silver Fox has his head in his hands. Time to press on. I turn back to my new worst enemy.
‘Just think how ambitious politicians are; how much they crave power. And not just any power, but the top job: Number Ten Downing Street, the finger on the nuclear button, even if it may not work properly without the Americans to help. Well, imagine h
ow much more ambitious politicians would be if they got all that and a hundred million a year as well. They’d be animals. Demons. Even more than they are already.’
I’d like to say it was all downhill from there, but amazingly they praise my honesty. They ask about the hours we work, the commitment we make, the personal sacrifices, the wrecked families, the physical toll. But they keep coming back to the same point. The people at the very top of the banking industry can make so much money in a few good years that they never need to work again. Does that make them take crazy risks? Of course. It’s the money, stupid. And I tell it like it is. Like it’s never been told before. And they love it. And me. Bizarre.
‘Mr Hart, are you saying that some senior bankers would jeopardise the well-being of their firms for the sake of one major bonus?’
‘Sure. One major bonus can be life-changing. Most of them would trash the firm in a heartbeat.’
‘Mr Hart, when things go wrong, as they have in recent times at some firms, should bankers say sorry?’
‘Most of them don’t know how, and if they did they wouldn’t mean it.’
‘Mr Hart, should the banks take a more socially responsible line in the business they transact?’
‘We’re here to make a profit. Anything that doesn’t add to the bottom line is of no interest to the vast majority of bankers. At least the successful ones.’
‘Mr Hart, is it right that senior bankers whose firms fail leave the industry with large pay-offs and pension funds?’
‘Of course not, but it’s a club. We all watch out for each other. You never know when you might need a hand yourself.’
‘Mr Hart, is it in the national interest that the City is run this way?’
‘No, but it suits us very well. The rest of you have been asleep and let us get away with it.’
They can’t complain – they said they wanted the truth. And at the end, amazingly, they thank me for my candour. They look genuinely delighted. This could have been just another tedious session with a grey man in a suit. Instead, they’ve got world news. The prime minister will be on the phone to Ivor Morgan in less than twenty minutes, followed by the chancellor and the governor of the Bank of England. Something must be done, and the select committee will have a heaven-sent grandstanding opportunity to set the pace. No wonder they think I walk on water. It’s only when I’m leaving and the Silver Fox, ashen-faced, grasps my arm and whispers, ‘Dave, what have you done?’ that I realise quite how well I’ve scored.
WHENEVER I’VE had bad press, I console myself with the thought that today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappings. Well, they used to be until health and safety arrived to save the world from food contaminated by whatever it is that people find in the Sun and the News of the World.
It would be wrong to say that my press today is bad. It’s execrable. Even I’m taken aback, and I thought I was prepared for it. ‘Banker admits greed’ should hardly make the headlines. Yet columnists are competing to outdo one another with their indignation. Some of them actually want me to give some of my money back. As if they would if they were ever lucky enough to make one tenth of my annual pay. Hypocrisy rules, along with anger, outrage and shrill screams for action. Bankers’ pay is firmly on the top of the agenda, and politicians are talking about introducing penal tax rates for bonuses, super levies on bank profits and a rigorous new regime of regulation to bring us firmly back under control. On the stock market, the whole banking sector’s fallen ten per cent in a couple of hours. There’s talk of a ‘day of action’ in the City by the massed ranks of low-life, parasite, tree-hugging anti-globalisation wankers, and apparently bankers have been receiving threats.
Threats! Can you imagine? And these threats aren’t the ones we’re used to, like losing our British Airways Premier Cards for not flying enough, or not having a parking space under the building. People actually want to be violent towards us. It seems so one-sided. We’re never violent towards anyone, unless you count a mild shove to knock an old granny aside when it’s raining and we’re running for a cab. But we certainly never commit violent crimes. Why would we ever need to?
Within Grossbank the view is that I’ve finally, definitively, lost my marbles. Yes, I was close to it on more than one occasion before, but this time it’s the real deal. No one wants to talk to me, and even the Silver Fox has taken a short break to calm his nerves while his team work overtime on damage limitation.
Within the investment banking industry, people are saying I could be their nemesis and no longer return my calls. This doesn’t really bother me. My immediate close circle of drug-taking, womanising, alcoholic buddies are sticking with me, so long as I have a never-ending supply of Columbian marching powder and a bevy of hot-and-cold running nymphettes in tow.
Paul and Two Livers are visibly – and understandably – distancing themselves from me. I’d like to think Two Livers is different, but professionally I know I have to face facts. If I’m going down, they’re going to do what all smart investment bankers plan to do to their bosses: they’ll dance on my grave.
The only good news comes from Rom Romanov and Bang Bang Lee. They both text to congratulate me and say how delighted they are at the way things are moving. At least someone’s happy.
THE HARDER we play, the faster we fall.
It’s 3 a.m. and I’m leaving Chi-Chi’s nightclub in Mayfair with Carla, twenty-two, from Madrid on one arm and Melissa on the other. Two Livers had to attend a dinner in Paris tonight and won’t be back until mid-morning, and I hate being lonely. So I called up Melissa and I’m going to introduce her to threesomes. She says she’s never been with another woman before, but she’s a game girl and I feel sure she’s going to love it. And even if she doesn’t, I definitely will.
I slip the doorman a lazy twenty and he steps into the street to hail a cab. Just then there’s a flash of cameras and several paparazzi types standing on the pavement start snapping away. Suddenly a microphone is thrust into my face.
‘Mr Hart, is it right that you’re partying while much of the banking sector is in crisis?’
I stare into the eyes of a thirty-something, not-quite-pretty brunette with frizzy hair and a cheap trouser suit that looks like it’s made from one-hundred-per-cent artificial fibre.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Wh–what do you mean?’
‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I? And I’ve been partying. And there’s certainly a crisis. So what you say has to be correct.’
‘But how do you justify that, Mr Hart?’
Christ, these people piss me off. ‘Justify what? I don’t have to justify anything. Grossbank’s fine. Rock solid in fact. Other firms are in the shit, not us.’
Behind her a cab pulls up and I step forward as the doorman opens the door for the girls to get in. The pushy reporter type is snapping at my heels, microphone still in hand.
‘So your firm is fine, with no problems like the others?’
‘None at all.’ She looks crestfallen. Who the hell put her up to this? Who knew I’d be here tonight? I can guess.
I’m about to climb into the cab when I pause and look at her again. I have a weakness for women. Yes, honestly. Especially when they’re deflated and vulnerable. Maybe I should toss her a bone. You never know – a threesome could easily be expanded, and I do have an awfully big bed. As a wiser man than me once said: you can never be too rich, too slim or have too much pussy.
‘We’re actually planning a major strategic initiative.’
‘Really?’ Her eyes light up. I try to imagine what she’d look like having a truly massive orgasm. Yes, she passes.
‘We’re thinking of buying the NHS.’
‘Buying the National Health Service? Grossbank? In the middle of a financial crisis? Are you serious?’
I nod. ‘Sure. The National Health Service is actually a national disgrace. It employs more people than any organisation in the world except the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Indian Railways and Wal-Mart,
and it has hugely dedicated doctors and nurses, yet it consistently fails the people of this country.’ I’m flying now, really getting into this, and hoping I’m not slurring my words. We polished off a magnum of Krug and several martinis earlier, plus I made two trips to the bathroom, all of which takes its toll and I just have to hope it doesn’t show. ‘We spend billions on healthcare and still suffer from sickness and fatalities that a First World nation simply shouldn’t accept.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘We’re going to seek talks with the government about mounting a leveraged buy-out, acquiring the health service through our principal investment arm, Grossbank Holdings.’
‘Grossbank Holdings is going to buy the NHS? All of it? The whole thing?’
‘Why not? It would be safe in our hands. We have the funds to invest, and as a private sector manager we can take the decisions government is afraid of.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like changing the fact that there are more administrators in the NHS than there are beds in hospitals. And more managers than consultants. The private sector would never accept that. We’ll bring greater efficiency, cost savings and investment. We’ll fire three quarters of the administrators and give a fifty-per-cent across-the-board pay rise to everyone involved in patient care. Under Grossbank, Britain will be healthier.’ I look at my watch. The girls are in the cab, the doorman is waiting for me to join them and the cabbie wants to know where we’re going. ‘Look – I’d love to go into this more with you. Would you like to join us?’
‘Join you? You mean – in there?’ She nods towards the cab.
‘Not in there. I mean, sure, we can talk in there. But I meant at my place – where we can have some privacy. All of us. You know …’
Dave Hart Omnibus II Page 8
